Coffee Market in France

The French « espresso Révolution »

By Charles Dubern

Introduction

The Arabs were the first not only to cultivate coffee but also to sell it. In the fifteenth century, coffee was only cultivated in Arabia, then in the sixteenth century it spread to Persia, Egypt and Syria.
Today, coffee is the first agricultural commodity traded worldwide and the second raw material marketed worldwide. The two largest stock exchanges for coffee are New York for Arabica, and London for Robusta.
This analysis will focus on France, as it is a very popular product in the country, where 5% of the total population pretend to drink coffee everyday but 94% drink coffee occasionally. It is the second most popular beverage after water. Those statistics make France the 10th world consumer.
The coffee market is a mature market and therefore there is no possibility of increasing the number of consumer in the country. Still, is there any opportunity for innovation for this very traditional beverage?

In this market analysis we will first look at the demand for coffee in France, the consumers habits and the development of consumption in France; in a second part we will analyse the supply in the country, differentiating the various competitors and their marketing strategies; we will finally look in the future and try to understand if whether or not there are new opportunities for coffee in France.

Demand for coffee in France

Coffee first arrived in France thank to the mayor of Amsterdam who offered to the French king Louis XIV in 1674 a coffee plant. The king immediately decided to plant it in the botanical garden in Versailles.
It became a product of mass consumption during the past 50 years and has first developed extensively then intensively.
Today coffee represents 20% of the consumption in drinks in the country and the consumption per inhabitant in France represents 5.4Kg/inhabitant/year, which is huge